Archive for the ‘Recent news’ Category

Adam Matthew Digital – A vast collection of digitized texts, including the Paston, Cely, Plumpton, Stonor, and Armburgh papers, medieval travel writing (“journeys of famous travellers from Prester John and Marco Polo to Sir John Mandefille and John Capgreve”, with translations, maps, and “fully searchable”). Unfortunately, it costs; I could not get at the pricing structure but the site seems to be aimed at institutions. They do have a “free trial” bit, which I did not access.

Early Book Society – for the study of manuscripts and printing history”. Started by Sara Horrall and Martha Driver “out of sessions planned for” the Medieval Congress at K’zoo; started in 1987. Their site is limited, but there are a couple of interesting bits (see, e.g., the Old Spice Answer Man on libraries).

Brepols Publishers – A publisher based in Belgium, with an international reach. They are the printers/publishers for an astounding number of journals, many of which are of interest to historains, medievalists, and archaeologists.

Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies – Duke University. Individual subscriptions are $38, for three issues annually. The site has no information about what periods or subjects the journal covers, so you’ll have to rely on the title.

Journal of Late Antiquity – from Johns Hopkins University. “…the first international English-language journal dedicated to the study of Late Antiquity writ large”. Individual subscriptions are $30/year (two issues), for either the print or electronic delivery.

Fifteenth Century Studies – put out regularly by Boydell & Brewer, publishers. “Fifteenth-Century Studies offers essays on diverse aspects of the period, including liberal and fine arts, historiography, medicine, and religion.“ It seems to be $75/issue. I am not sure whether one can subscribe or purchase book-by-book / issue-by-issue. The URL delivers you to issue #34.

Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies – It offers a journal titled “Mediaeval Studies”, “…established in 1939 and from the outset its purpose has been the publication of research on the Middle Ages by scholars throughout the world, particularly research involving unedited manuscript and archival material.” Variously priced; the newest volumes are $90, and decrease to $40 for the ones printed before 1997. PIMS also publishes books, most of which are, although medieval in subject, tend to be aimed at a very particular, churchly market.

Plainsong and Medieval Music – courtesy of Cambridge Journals Online, “in association with the Plainsong and Medieval Music Society and Cantus Planus, study group of the International Musicological Society”. Back issues seem to cost $110, or $1,700 for the complete set (1992-2008). Cambridge Journals has other historical-type journals – Anglo-Saxon England, The Antiquaries Journal (mentioned in a previous post, I believe), Archaeologia, Archaeological Reports.

Viking Society for Northern Research (VSNR) – “…the world’s foremost learned society in the field of medieval Scandinavian and Northern studies.” Started as “the Orkney, Shetland and Northern Society, or the Viking Club.” A British group, although membership is apparently open to all; “…founded as an Antiquarian, Literary and Social Society.” A list of their publications. This page points to a North American sales agent at ACMRS (see previous blog entries), but when I clicked on the link, I got back a 404 Page Not Found error message. Perhaps one might instead contact Roy Rukkila, Managing Editor, ACMRS, at mrts@asu.edu

Magnum Legendarium Austriacum – or, rather, the Wikepedia article on it. At the bottom of this page are 3 links to the M.L.A. and one to the Diplomarbeit zum Thema, which seems to be a thesis on the MLA submitted for the degree of MPhil. All four of these links take you to sites in German, but damned if they don’t look interesting anyway.

SFB-Project: Visions of Community – under the auspices of Universitat Wien. “VISCOM focuses on the question how universal religions have shaped the construction of particular communities and identities in the middle ages. The project proposes a comparative approach focusing on Christian, Islamic and Buddhist examples in the course of the ‘Middle Ages’ in order to explore the interaction between religious and political ‘visions of community’. “

I have a note about one of the exhibitors at K’zoo that reads “king alfred’s notebook – ‘”the worlds most famous lost medieval book’”, with an address in South Carolina. I Googled it, and found only one reference, to the LLC registration at the South Carolina’s Secretary of State’s office. Any more information would be gladly received; I have a severe case of curiosity about a guy who’d pay for a table at K’zoo for something that might not exist.

Lightly edited. Also, there’s a lot of stuff I’d love to track down first so as to give a good overview (definitions of unfamiliar terms, URL’s for sites good and bad, interesting books, people I met, scholarly affiliations) but upon looking at my notes, that’s going to be damn near impossible without a month or so for the research and another month of writing – and what would come out the other end would be a scholarly, notated, footnoted, and pompous paper.

So, let’s do the fallback commentary: quick and dirty, and I may add more information throughout the next little while. And if anyone has questions about particulars, write me.

(I not only threw out the 300-page-or-so program before I left Kalamazoo, not wanting to take overweight baggage onto the plane, but they seem to have excised the PDF version from the website – and probably won’t put it in the archived sessions bit for a while. That’s why I can’t give the titles of the sessions, nor any sense of who the participants were unless they are in my notes.)

[And the HTML mark-up problems I had with version 1.0 of this post have been fixed!]

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The iPad 2 I took to the conference was wonderful. It has a long-lasting battery (rated at 10 hours), it has internal illumination so one can use it in a room darkened to show slides, it has WiFi (and some models also have access to the telephone system) to allow Internet access. It’s got a keyboard almost large enough for even my non-slender fingers to almost touch-type on it.

The one problem is that the only word processing loaded on it is Apple’s Notes, which is about as stripped down a piece of software as you can get. You type in new stuff. You can erase stuff word-by-word. It’s got auto-correction if you like. But I couldn’t find any way to put the cursor in the middle of any word to correct a typo, which means you have to put it at the end of the wood and delete and then retype. No formatting other than a choice between three fonts. Not much of anything other than typing, really basic deleting, and automatic saving – you type in one extra letter, and it’ll be there the next time you open that note. And to my great disgust, there’s no Undo feature, which I badly need because I sometimes delete one or two words extra.

So last night I went surfing, and found an App that’s a bit more powerful. Not up to Microsoft’s Word, of course, but it does Undo, and internal deletes, and even has diacritical marks available. The app is Fast Keyboard; I have yet to put it to a good, hard use, so this is not an official recommendation, just a notice that there’s something other than “Notes” out there.

These tablet computers are quite nice. Not perfect, but nice for travelling, most assuredly.

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There was a session on Tolkien and the heroes therein, about which I remember nothing other than having attended.

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HMML is the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library, a few miles west of Minneapolis/St. Paul, at St. John’s University.

Their primary mission is to, basically, copy and back-up as many medieval manuscripts as they can get, by photographing them, microfilming them, digitizing them, and otherwise storing for the long term in as good a set of facsimiles as current technology allows.

It has been, is, and will be for a long while a real bitch cataloguing all those books. It’s not a question of Author, title, length of text (as in how many pages), size of book (folio, quarto, octavo….), quires, date made, and how many illuminations there are. It’s a question of all that, plus what the leaves are made of, the color and probable formulation of the ink, ditto the illuminations, the subject of the illuminations PLUS all the people and objects depicted within the illuminations, the full text, and all sorts of what The Professionals call Metadata. Fearsomely complicated job.

“Regular” books, the type you find in your typical library, have a more-or-less standard cataloguing-entry system; the main one I’ve heard talk of is called MARC. There are probably others that are more recent, more usable, and more whatever, but that’s the one I’ve heard. It’s been around for 40 or 50 years, and today’s standard-book standard-cataloguing system has pretty much gotten all the details down right.

That’s not true of pre-printing-press books, of which there are literally hundreds of thousands. (HMML, as of a few years ago, had 90,000 facsimiles.) Trying to come up with a good system that covers all the books, all the book formats, and all the information in the books, for dozens of languages, is fearsomely complicated.

This session was a very basic class on how it’s being done at HMML, in very broad language aimed at people who like old books but are not by any means professional librarians. People like me, for example.

[Lengthy exegesis on Vivarium, Oliver, and the Arca Artium, not gone into here. One’s the main database, the second is the digital database, and the third’s the database for art objects not classified as books – e.g. sculptures, paintings, textiles, and the like.]

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Then, to a session hosted by DISTAFF (Discussion, Interpretation, and Study of Textile Arts, Fabrics, and Fashion, which included a presentation on the people behind the Bayeux tapestry, in essence the presenter’s book (Tina Kane’s The Troyes Mémoire: The Making of a Medieval Tapestry condensed into a half hour. Not the weavers, not the floss makers, not the drawers of the pictures that the weavers went by, but the actual designer(s), the guy(s) who decided what would be included in the tapestry together with where it all would go together with the iconography together with what scenes would go where and what would be included in the scenes. Records of such design work are exceedingly rare; La Troyes Memoire’s a valuable source of information for that reason.

Thence quickly to a short paper on farthingales, by Emma Lehman, an Independent Scholar.

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The day after the session presented by HMML, I went to one discussing the Institut fur realienkunde des mittelalters und der fruhen neuzeit realonline, (and please forgive me if I have misspelled it), a group that is overseeing an attempt to come up with a good cataloguing strategy for damn near everything – material artifacts, paintings, sculptures, books – owned by 500 European institutions with 50,000,000 (fifty million) objects. Even more massive a job than the one HMML is working on, but with lots less text to deal with. Think of it as a humongous card catalog; they won’t have (if I remember correctly) images of the artifacts, but will have links to the institutions that own the objects – you use the card catalog to see what objects you want to see, and then click on a link that takes you to the County Historical Museum for Outer Upper Prussistanistan, which has photos of the object it owns. I think.

…..there’s still no satisfactory OCR (optical character recognition, i.e., usable by computers to convert text-in-books to text-on-hard-drive) software. And they suggest it may take years, especially when you consider not only how many hands were used (everything from Carolingian minuscule to Tudor English secretary hand to Italian humanist script) but also how many languages (Old High Dutch, Old Low German, Church Slavonic, Syriac, Greek, Hebrews…..) there were.

MAREAL’s image server may be found here.

Another database-type scheme is the MHDBDB (the “mittelhochdeutsche begriffsdatenbank”), a “middle high German conceptual database at the University of Salzburg”. Yet another thing I want to check into later. It has something to do with an “intelligent query system”, that, I believe, lets you not only click on a word or phrase to find all examples of that word/phrase in one book but also in other books – and will link to physical representations of the word if it’s a noun (e.g., clicking on “Jesus Christ” will not only find you every book that mentions “Jesus Christ” but also all paintings and sculptures and illuminations that have Jesus Christ the person somewhere in the art work.

They’re nuts, I tell you, nuts. Nuts with OCD. But my kind of nuts with OCD.

They’re also working on “beispiel fragment-identificationem”, the ability to search for fragments of sentences from fragments of pages, in other works. If you have a page, a folio, of which the left half has been eaten by worms or toasted by a fire, you could enter the surviving three sentence fragments (“…nd then Saint J….. which is right above “…..mitted an act of…..” right above “….ite him into b….”), and see if those bits match up any other document – and if it does you know what manuscript your fragment came from, which is a lot more information than you had before. My note on this was “it is quite impressive”, after they did a quick demo of it.

My favorite quote of the session : “Disambiguation is a long process for us.”

At the end, during the questions-from-the-audience portion, I asked about whether there already was a standard cataloguing system for artworks the way there already is for regular books; the common consensus was “HA! We wish!” There is no such thing; every country/grouping-of-museums/professional organization seems to have its own, and I got the impression there’s not only no one system, there’s no approaching consensus on which system will win out, and no desire to even think about having a group think about forming a consensus. At least not yet. That’s why the MHDBDB, and the HMML (up at top of this note) and all the others are developing their own cataloguing system, their own structures, their own databases – there’s no overarching authority nor consensus about which way is best. Hell, there’s no consensus if anything will work, much less which one will work best.

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And, finally, I went to a session on gardens and gardeining. There’s something called the Medieval Association of Rural Studies which is trying to get off the ground, so to speak. I do not know much else about it, but I signed up for their email newsletter.

Some discussion about the uses to which garden produce was put, as opposed to those hoity-toity professional theoretical historians who discuss….well, never mind. I wasn’t expecting much from this bit of the session, and I got it.

Then came a pair of brief presentations on gendered garden transfers (turns out that while women may have done all the gardening, it was by a vast majority the men who actually owned the gardens that the women worked on, at least in this one small town in Provence). The second presenter’s contribution was one of those “I came across this interesting set of data that is good enough to talk about for ten or fifteen minutes, but isn’t worth actually publishing as anything other than a footnote to someone else’s paper” things. For what it was, however, it was interesting.

I have a note to check out the “homepage of Martha Carlin, which you can get to if you Google her; her webpage comes up first”. I will, soon.

Last week, we took possession of a long-expected shipment from Cornell University Press and the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Texts: a book on manuscript studies, three cooking-related titles, one on medieval smelting and fire, and one on Silkewormes [sic]. Check the Featured Products section on the store’s home page for this set.
We’ve received a shipment of 10 titles from Dover Books, mostly coloring and cut-and-assemble books on medieval subjects – heraldry, helms, armor, tournaments and jousts, castles – and a book on the history of sundials and the making thereof. Most of them have been put into a new category, Children’s Books, with the sundials book in Artifacts, Buildings, Archeology.
While we’re on the subject of categories, we have decided to shift the five or six titles in the Used Books – Facsimiles into the more general Used Books – C&I category, just in case anyone was curious as to where they disappeared to. (And, obviously, the Facsimiles category has been discontinued….)
We shall be signing up with an appropriate service to start accepting credit cards when we go on sales trips; we are unsure as to exactly when this will happen, but we are hopeful it shouldn’t be too long. If you order from the web site, please continue using PayPal or sending checks or money orders as before, until further notice.

We have added several ceramic items to the bookstore’s site, in the All! New! Arts & Crafts (non-books) section. Selection is a bit limited, and it will be a couple of months, perhaps longer, perhaps much longer, before we can restock these items, as the ceramist (Susan Harfield of Uncommon Clay, in the Florida Keys) also works full-time….
The category currently contains mugs, shot glasses, plates, chalices, a milk pitcher, a “likker” bottle, and drop spindles (ceramic whorls, wooden spindles).
Since this is a new area for us, this is a test: while we hope that it becomes quite successful, we also have no illusions that we will ever become millionaires off of it. If it does take off, we shall be looking for other crafts people to include; preference will be given to 3-D artists and crafters – potters, woodworkers, tool-makers (we hear there’s a market for lucets…..), small decorative ironwork (we own a nifty bottle-opener with a dragon’s mouth)…..

Just received (FedEx delivers non-overnight packages on Saturdays?) today, three-volume sets of D.S. Richards’ translation of The Chronicle of Ibn al-Athir for the Crusading Period from al-Kamil fi’l-Ta’rikh. Parts 1-3: The Years 491–629/1097–1231. The three-book set has been added to the website; we shall add the individual titles within the next day or two. This brings to a dozen or so the number of titles we carry of translations of period sources concerning the Crusades.

When we got back from vacation a week ago, we found in the held-mail containers copies of Corwin’s Chasing and Repousse: Methods Ancient and Modern.

…and the books keep rolling in:
Oxford University Press, two facsimiles of Books of Hours (Gualenghi d’Este and Simon de Varie), a children’s book on illumination (Marguerite Makes a Book), and one on understanding illuminated manuscripts – or, rather, four books from the Getty Museum via OUP.

University of Toronto Press delivered two books on Italian Renaissance comedies (with translations), a book on medieval bookbinding, and a massive translation of a massive Italian cookbook, the former being of Terence Scully and the latter, Bartolomeo Scappi.